Although Nintendo are set to officially announce the specs for the Wii U at a press conference on September 13th, developers are rumoured to have let slip on a few details about the next generation console. Here is a selection of Wii U features currently circulating the tech community.

Wii U: The latest

The Wii U is set to be powered by the BM Power PC, which some have hinted is slower than the CPU offered by the Xbox 360. However some of the benefits of the alleged CPU chosen by Nintendo is the fact that IBM is likely to offer them a good deal on the CPU in this configuration.

The device is set to feature 1GB of RAM, roughly double the size offered by the Xbox 360, and the console’s graphics are set to be powered by an AMD/ATI 7 series GPU with a DirectX 10 feature set that includes embedded eDRAM (in a similar way to Wii).

Wii U: Nintendo’s new direction?

According to Blitz Games Studios’ design director John NasIt’s Nintendo is taking a different track when it comes to its future consoles – one that isn’t solely focused on the power of the platform:

“It’s not about beating everyone else in a surface shader processing clock speed war. That’s not what they’re about. They’re about saying, we’ve got this great roster of IP, all these great characters, how do we build a piece of cost-effective hardware – they’re a business, they’ve got to make profit – that will allow our players, our very loyal Nintendo players, to interact with this IP and great worlds and characters in a new way?”

“If you think about the Wii U in that light, suddenly it makes a huge amount of sense. Suddenly we’re going to be able to explore the world of Zelda and Mario in a new way with our friends. And that’s the rationale behind that platform. It’s not a gunning war in terms of hardware.”

Nintendo has argued that the Wii U will create “a second window into the video game world” and only time will tell if it delivers on this promise.